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Tuesday, August 25, 2009

A place for all food photos

If you are a food blogger, you've probably heard of the food photo-posting sites like TasteSpotting.com, FoodGawker.com, and PhotoGrazing.com. You have also most likely submitted some of your own photos for the sites to post; there's no doubt it's a great way to increase traffic to your blog. But what about the pictures that aren't accepted? The pictures that are declined with comments like "unflattering composition", "not sharp", "unflattering lighting", "exposure issues", "low contrast", and "not a compelling subject"?

Stings, doesn't it?

I was so excited the first time I saw one of my pictures on TasteSpotting. My picture was out there, on the world wide web, for anyone with an internet connection to see. Wow...so awesome. Then I got my first rejection. Ouch! Like a personal blow, the rejection comment said, "unflattering composition". More rejected pictures were to come; more, even, than the ones that were accepted. I started to wonder about my ability, I mean, I'm writing a cookbook and I have a food blog. If these popular sites didn't want my pictures...who was I kidding?

Then, one afternoon while I was making a comment on another blog, I saw a comment with a link to a blog called TasteStopping. The comment said TasteStopping was a food photo posting site, but with a surprising difference from TasteSpotting and others in the same catagory: TasteStopping only wanted photos rejected by the other sites.

This I had to see.

Of course, I feel in love with the idea right away. Just because a picture isn't perfect doesn't mean the food isn't great, and the blog doesn't deserve to be visited. Besides, I have my suspicions about the judging criteria by which the big photo posting sites accept or reject submissions. For the massive number of photos they do post, they must have many, many people going through the submissions. And whether or not a person likes something is very subjective, which is how I can almost copy the composition of other photos on a site like TasteSpotting and still get rejected, and how a photo I feel has no redeeming compositional (is that a word) value, or has terrible lighting (doesn't mean it doesn't taste good), smiles at me from the computer screen.

TasteStopping, with it's humorous play-on-words titles, gives all rejected food photos--the good and the ugly--a place to be posted.

2 comments:

Wow, Tiffiny! Thank you so much for this lovely mention. I am having so much fun with TasteStopping; I hope my visitors are, too. What's not to love, though, considering the wide variety of photos and recipes that you'll find on my site (that the others won't show you!). All the foodies/bloggers I've met along the way feel like friends, kindred spirits in the pursuit of the next great meal. So glad to have had the honor of publishing your photos. I'll keep you posted on the launch of the "official" site, hopefully coming soon.